Eugene H. Peterson Quotes
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My job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them see the grace operating in their lives.
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In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.
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Waiting means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.
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Sabbath is that uncluttered time and space in which we can distance ourselves from our own activities enough to see what God is doing.
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You're here to be LIGHT... Shine! Be generous with your lives.
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It's essential for us to develop an imagination that is participatory. Art is the primary way in which this happens. It's the primary way in which we become what we see or hear.
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The life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which Gods grace and love are expereinced.
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That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.
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There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible - at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.
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When you are part of a megachurch you have no responsibility to anybody else.
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You don't make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.
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Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God; it whets our appetite.
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Prayer is the disciplined refusal to act before God acts.
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Go out into the world uncorrupted, a breath of fresh air in this squalid and polluted society. Provide people with a glimpse of good living and of the living God.
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Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?
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It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.
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The only opportunity you will ever have to live by faith is in the circumstances you are provided this very day: this house you live in, this family you find yourself in, this job you have been given, the weather conditions that prevail at the ...moment.
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I believe God takes the things in our lives - family, background, education - and uses them as part of his calling. It might not be to become a pastor. But I don't think God wastes anything.
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When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
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We've all met a certain type of spiritual person. She's a wonderful person. She loves the Lord. She prays and reads the Bible all the time. But all she thinks about is herself. She's not a selfish person. But she's always at the center of everything she's doing.
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It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.
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Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.
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O God, when my faith gets overladen with dust, blow it clean with the wind of your Spirit. When my habits of obedience get stiff and rusty, anoint them with the oil of your Spirit. Restore the enthusiasm of my first love for you.
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I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.